What is stephaneginier.com?

Updated

stephaneginier.com is the personal website of Stéphane Ginier, a developer who builds digital sculpting tools. The site is a simple portfolio-style homepage that links to his projects, most notably Nomad Sculpt and SculptGL. It does not sell anything directly, though a PayPal signal appears on the page; the main value is access to web apps, downloads, tutorials, and source code.

What you'll find on the site

The homepage is organized as a short project list rather than a blog or store. Each entry points to a tool, a download, or an external channel.

  • Nomad Sculpt — described as a sculpting application for iOS and Android, listed as currently in development.
  • SculptGL — a digital sculpting web app, with sources on GitHub, a standalone download, a Chrome Web Store listing, and tutorial links on a YouTube channel.
  • Sculptfab — noted as a fork of the old SculptGL version by Sketchfab with a new design.
  • EditSDF — a smaller experimental project for raymarched signed distance fields, described as less polished and somewhat clunky in its GUI.
  • Contact — an email address, [email protected], plus a copyright line dated 2020.

SculptGL: the main web tool

SculptGL is the most detailed project on the page. It runs in the browser and also has a standalone version described as identical to the web version.

Sculpting and painting features

  • Standard sculpting tools: Brush, Inflate, Smooth, Twist, Drag, and others.
  • PBR vertex painting covering color, roughness, and metalness.
  • Alpha texture support for each tool.
  • Multiresolution sculpting with quad-tri subdivision (Catmull-Clark/Loop) and reversion, which computes the opposite of subdivision where possible.
  • Navigating between low and high poly subdivision levels retains sculpting changes and keeps UVs for both reversion and subdivision.

Remeshing and topology

  • Voxel remeshing uses the SurfaceNets meshing algorithm and produces a quad-only mesh.
  • Uniform remeshing keeps quads the same size.
  • Voxel remeshing can create non-manifold vertices; for a non-closed mesh, a naive hole-filling algorithm runs first.
  • Voxel remeshing deletes UVs.
  • Dynamic topology works on triangles only, operates in real time, and supports local subdivision (creating new triangles) and local decimation (deleting triangles). It also deletes UVs.

Import, export, and performance

  • Supports OBJ, PLY, and STL import/export.
  • Reads vertex color.
  • Optimizes post and pre transform cache using a tipsy algorithm.
  • Includes undo/redo support.

When this site is useful to you

  • You want a browser-based sculpting tool and prefer something you can try without installing anything — SculptGL fits that, with a standalone download if you'd rather run it locally.
  • You work on iOS or Android and are looking for Nomad Sculpt, which the page lists as the current focus.
  • You want the source code or a Chrome Web Store install for SculptGL, both of which are linked from the page.
  • You're curious about experimental graphics work like EditSDF, keeping in mind the author's own note that it's less polished.

If you need tutorials, the page points to a YouTube channel rather than hosting them itself. For anything else, the listed contact is the email address above.